The quiet community of Moscow, Id., never really made headlines—until Bryan Kohbergerbrutally killed four University of Idaho students in cold blood in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022.
Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves and Ethan Chapin were all asleep when he entered their college rental home and stabbed them to death. Xana Kernodle (Chapin's girlfriend) valiantly fought back against the intruder, who was masked at the time, but ultimately succumbed to her injuries: She suffered numerous defensive wounds and was stabbed more than 50 times.
Kohberger was arrested on Dec. 30, 2022, and just before the case was set to go to trial, he agreed to a plea bargain: On July 23, 2025, Kohberger pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree, premeditated murder, plus one count of burglary, in exchange for escaping the death penalty. He received four consecutive life sentences.
The crime was so disturbing that even law enforcement officers were unsettled by what they saw, and the victims' families and friends still have a slew of unanswered questions, not the least of which is, Why them?. While the new NetflixdocuseriesThe Idaho Murders: College Nightmare(that hits Netflix today, July 29) doesn't answer all of their questions, it does shed some light on certain aspects of the horrific crime that many hadn't known about before.
University of Idaho murder victims Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan ChapinIdaho Statesman / Getty Images
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One element missing from the docuseries is Kohberger's withdrawal of his guilty plea, which took place on Monday, July 27, 2026—long after the docuseries was completed.
Kohberger told the New York Times that he worked with Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who analyzed the crime scene for Kohberger's defense team, and that Turvey believes that the evidence points to multiple suspects being involved in the slayings.
"A lot went wrong in those plea discussions. I really do want that to be heard. Unanswered questions seem to multiply with each piece of discovery unsealed," Kohberger said in a statement. "The intention is for all of those questions to be investigated and answered appropriately in a trial setting."
He also noted that he knows he faces capital punishment if he goes to trial and that he does not care if he gets the death penalty.
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Hunter Johnson, a friend of the victims, was at the house when police came. Johnson told police that one of the housemates told him that an intruder was in the home, so he came over. He grabbed a knife to protect himself and was who called the cops when he found them dead, with Kohberger long gone from the scene.
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The crime scene was so brutal that some the local police chief needed mental health treatment afterward.
Moscow Police Department chief Anthony Dahlinger said he was home on his day off when the bodies were discovered and knew that when he got the call to come to a crime scene that it was going to be bad.
"Without going into too much detail, it was absolutely horrific," Dahlinger said. "That's something that nobody expects to ever see, and something that you can't unsee once you see it. I know not only myself, but every officer that was involved that day has had a hard time with that." He later admitted that he had to get professional help for the trauma from the case.
Roommates Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke were home at the time of the slayings and hid in a locked bedroom. Online sleuths and those uninvolved with the case frequently asked why the roommates took eight hours to call for help. Dahlinger acknowledged that the roommates were likely in shock and terrified to make any sounds for fear of the killer coming for them as well.
"Shock and trauma ... can impair judgment," he said. "It can impair thought processes."
Further, a coroner told the victims' families that even if someone called 911 sooner, the victims would not have survived their injuries.
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Dylan Mortensen told police she saw a man in the hallway and heard him speak to Kaylee Goncalves.
Mortensen said that she saw a lean, masked man in the hallway before she knew what was happening. Once she did, she and Funke hid in a locked bedroom, and Mortensen heard a man's voice tell Goncalves, "It's going to be OK. I'm gonna help you," but he that he didn't sound helpful or kind, calling his tone "weird."
Police initially listed Goncalves' ex-boyfriend Jack DuCoeur as a person of interest, interviewing him and numerous other students as part of their investigation. DuCoeur and Goncalves remained friendly, and she called DuCoeur several times the night of the attack. DuCoeur told police she would call him often, especially if she was home alone, and that it didn't seem unusual to him at the time.
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The University of Idaho sent out a bulletin about the murders before all of the victims' families and next of kin had been informed.
Police said that not all of the bodies had been positively identified before the college sent out an announcement that a murder occurred, leading to confusion and fear among not just victims' families, but also other students and locals in the community.
A neighbor's outdoor camera captured a light-colored vehicle coming in and out of the King Road neighborhood several times throughout the night of the slayings, but the video wasn't clear enough to determine a specific make, model or license plate. Investigators worked with a special analyst, who determined it was a Hyundai Elantra from the years 2011 to 2016. Investigators sifted through thousands of vehicles before narrowing it down to Kohberger's.
Kohberger's phone was in the King Road area at odd hours of the night repeatedly in the four months leading up to the slayings, typically between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. each time. On the night of murders, Kohberger's phone showed it connected to cell towers near his Pullman, Wash., home at 2:42 a.m. At 2:47 a.m., Kohberger left his residence, went south and actively turned off his phone. His Elantra was seen exiting the crime scene so fast that he almost crashed at 4:20 a.m. At 4:48 a.m., his phone reactivated south of Moscow on highway I-95. At 5:30 a.m., his phone was traced back to his home in Pullman.
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Bryan Kohberger worked close to Xana Kernodle's sister.
Xana Kernodle's sister, Jazzmin Kernodle, was a student at Washington State University, where Kohberger was a teaching assistant.
According to forum posts from Kohberger, he suffered from a neurological condition called visual snow syndrome, also called visual static. According to Cleveland Clinic, visual snow syndrome can be likened to seeing the world as if it's in a snow globe that's been shaken, or like watching an old antenna TV through static. Kohberger wrote posts saying he didn't know what it was like to see people well or "live in the real world." Depersonalization, or the sense of feeling disconnected from one's self, can be a symptom that visual snow-afflicted patients experience, as well as depression, anxiety and irritability.
"I have no opinion, I have no emotions, I have nothing," he wrote in part in one post. In another, he described himself as "stuck in the void of nothing ... I constantly have to battle my demons." He did not say what those demons were.
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DNA evidence was scant in the case, so investigators had to think outside the box to obtain it.
FBI did deep dive of Kohberger's car but vehicle was "spotless. There was nothing to be found." Though investigators recovered DNA from the knife sheath left at the crime scene, they weren't initially able to find any DNA in their own databases or with any others that matched what they'd found.
Police employed investigative DNA geneaology, which can potentially match DNA to blood relatives whose DNA may be accessible in databases.
Once they honed in on Kohberger using circumstantial evidence, they learned that police pulled him over twice in Indiana on Dec. 15, 2022, for following other vehicles too closely, and that his father was in the car with him both times. Police surmised he was traveling back to his parents' home in Pennsylvania, where they began surveilling him, but noticed something truly strange (unless, you know, you're a killer): He only left the house three times in about two weeks, and each time, he wore rubber gloves inside and outside the house.
Police decided to wait for the family to dispose of their trash for collection, which they could legally collect. The day they came to collect the Kohbergers' trash, they saw Kohberger walking down the street. A Q-tip they recovered from the family's garbage tested positive to be the father of the person whose DNA was on the knife sheath that was found at the Idaho college rental where the murders happened. Kohberger has no brothers, so the cops had their man.
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